Write on MacHD from XP?

August 8, 2010 11:42 AM

Is it possible to write to Macintosh HD from within a Windows XP boot camp partition?

I've set read/write permission in OSX to all/all but I still receive errors writing to MacHD from XP. I didn't anticipate how much I'd be using XP and now I'm running short on disk space. Hopefully there's a way to get out of reformatting / resizing and reinstalling. I do have a portable drive, but I'd prefer not to use it.

posted by Lorin to computers & internet (4 answers total)

You can't write to the Mac partition because it's formatted in HFS+ and XP is expecting the NTFS or FAT32 file system. I've never used it, but the commercial app MacDrive is supposed to be able to write to Mac partitions from Windows.
posted by sharkfu at 12:02 PM on August 8, 2010

Awesome, that is exactly what I'm looking for. Every time I searched the results were full of information on accessing Windows from OS X so I never got very far. Thanks!
posted by Lorin at 12:06 PM on August 8, 2010

HFS+ for Windows from Paragon is $10 cheaper.

It's also possible to resize your bootcamp partition by making an image of the Windows partition, using Bootcamp assistant to remove the partition and then create a new larger one, then restoring the Windows image to that larger partition. I'd do it using DeployStudio myself, but you might find that too technical, there are other tools out there for making and restoring Windows images from the Mac OS.

Alternatively, you could use something like Parallels Desktop for Mac to boot your Bootcamp partition from within the Mac OS, and then you'd have read/write access from XP.
posted by jardinier at 1:04 PM on August 8, 2010

When I need to move data between my Mac and Windows partitions, I use a thumb drive.
posted by neuron at 8:24 PM on August 8, 2010